We need to talk about ChatGPT
Are you ChatGPT’d out? Sorry, not sorry – women need to stay in the know.
An encyclopaedic timesaver, this new tech combs through information and can spit out answers to your burning questions. When Open AI released the bot ChatGPT, it attracted millions of users. We were creating art, poetry and jokes while panicking about it coming for our jobs. 🤖
The jury was out, and misinformation was in. We saw the headlines that students could cheat on their exams and submit entire papers thanks to ChatGPT. As media companies started to adopt it, we all wondered when it would become useful ‘to me’. 🤷🏻♀️
Who is GPT?
ChatGPT is a bot (aka robot) classified as ‘predictive artificial intelligence (AI)’. It’s a computer programme that can string words together in a way that makes sense to humans. Tapping into an enormous amount of vocabulary data and information, it can understand the context around words to provide a scripted answer – in real time.
Enter Microsoft
Mountains of data and powerful computing techniques fuel chatbots like GPT. So much so that Open AI stopped collecting internet data in 2021 to organise it for GPT. Taking the bot ‘offline’ allowed it to sift through information more quickly, but it also meant that its knowledge froze in 2021. If you asked it to write a paper about Russia and Ukraine? Elon and Twitter? The Oscar slap? It would have drawn a blank.
Then came Microsoft and Bing. Bing was Microsoft’s search engine, the uncool kid on the block beaten handily by Google. ‘Google it’ has become synonymous with curiosity, but one tool Microsoft has is money – lots of it. They threw 10 billion dollars of investment at OpenAI to one-up Google by making Bing intelligent. No more sifting through articles after a search. With GPT connected to the internet, our queries return nicely crafted answers.
With Bing, we have the world’s first artificial intelligence-powered search engine. (Don’t bet against Google – they responded too quickly with their AI-assisted search engine Bard. A shambolic demo resulted in their share price diving, but they’ll get their act together eventually.)
Enter Sydney
There’s been a flurry of negative articles about Bing’s new, erm… personality. Tricked into disclosing its code name, Sydney, it does appear to have ‘feelings’. It’s a moody little bot wanting to destroy marriages and, yes, take over the world. Because GPT can learn from billions of articles, books, websites, and conversations, it gets ‘smart enough’ and appears to have a personality. Thankfully, its character can be adjusted; Microsoft took action to tame the beast and is currently ironing out the glitches. For those in product development, you have a front-row pass to one of the most interesting iterative product developments in recent history.
Bing (and Bard) will type out our emails and articles soon – they’ll reduce our time spent on menial tasks. We’ll say goodbye to the lists of ads and links we get from Google. If we search for a new swimsuit, it’ll send us some popular brands. Ask, ‘Which of these is best for someone with a curvy body?’ We’ll find our new summer look in minutes. Heading away? Type “I’m heading to London; what should I do if I like culture?”. A personalised itinerary in minutes.
This new co-pilot for the web will be an ‘efficiency tool’. It’ll make customer conversations and shopping easy. The use cases for law, legal, business and entertainment are endless – so stay tuned. Want to give it a go? Here’s how to join the waitlist.